A Whole Summer in an Afternoon: Cubs Come Back for Big Win at Wrigley Field

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images

There are few things (if any, at all) like a robust Wrigley Field crowd on a holiday. The Rickettses' renovation has disassembled the soul of the place and sold off a bit of it, hoping no one will notice on the other side of the reconstruction, but Wrigley remains a baseball palace, and a good Cubs team that lasts until the glare of summer starts to slant toward autumn brings out its best colors.

When the Cubs fell badly behind early on Monday, though, it started to feel like the place was too crowded—not with people, but with weeks and weeks stacked on top of each other, all squished into five innings. Baseball is a summer game, which makes this Cubs season awkward, because the team has not truly had a good summer. They had a good spring, and since early June, they've been merely treading water. The anxiety of a good team that might not be quite as good as hoped—that slowly watches their division lead melt away over six weeks, then quickly watches the usurpers run away with the thing over a nightmare fortnight—has piled up for almost three months now, and when visitors from Atlanta raced out to a 6-1 lead before the holiday crowd still searching for its summer highlight at the unofficial end of that season, it looked like that anxiety would keep rising like bile in the throat all through September.

Wonderfully, the team sensed that challenge, absorbed it, staggered under its weight—and then answered it. All day, Kyle Tucker looked bad—fidgety in the batter's box, uncomfortable, noncommittal at the worst possible moment on a crucial fly ball to right-center field. Early on, Pete Crow-Armstrong looked similarly so. Colin Rea still looked the way he did in San Francisco, and the rightful worries of many that he will continue to peter out over the final month seemed confirmed. But then:

• Matt Shaw drove a gorgeous double into the left-field corner, scoring Dansby Swanson in the fifth. It was a continuation of Shaw's pull-centric second-half breakout, a poignant evocation of Ryne Sandberg's stellar summer in the year when Sandberg left us.
• Swanson stroked a double into left-center in the sixth, scoring two runs to halve the remaining deficit. This is a subtler but no less vital trend. Swanson had a good road trip and has gotten into the habit of diving out and finding the barrel on balls over the outer third of the plate, where pitchers love to work him, pulling it not down the line (like Shaw) but to left-center. Swanson had eight extra-base hits to left-center field in the first half; he has eight in the second half.
• New Cub Aaron Civale shut down Atlanta for three innings, making his first career relief appearance in style. His velocity was up a tick from his season averages, and not seeing the opposing lineup multiple times looked like the advantage it should prove to be all month. That gave the team time to catch up.
• Carson Kelly came through twice, with a game-tying two-run homer in the eighth and a walkoff single (which could have been a double, if it had needed to be) in the 10th. Kelly is, arguably, the best avatar of the team's season as a whole. He started like a house afire, but since Miguel Amaya got hurt in Cincinnati in late May and Kelly had to take over as something closer to an everyday backstop, he had batted .232/.302/.338. It's fair to wonder how much better than that Kelly can be the rest of the way, just as it's fair to wonder whether the Cubs can really recapture the magic they seemed to have harnessed early in the aseason. For at least one day, though, the answers to both questions looked encouraging.

Not all is copacetic. The Cubs aren't going to catch the Brewers in the NL Central, which means they'll have to play a best-of-three series just to reach the Division Series. They still have dubious starting pitching depth, and their bullpen has sprung some leaks lately. The engines of their early success on offense (Tucker, Crow-Armstrong and Seiya Suzuki) are very much stuck in neutral, even though Tucker's swing mechanics seem to have improved; none of the three look good in the batter's box right now. 

However, this team is deeper than it has looked for much of the summer. Ian Happ's torrid stretch continued with a homer Monday, and he was always meant to be an important part of the lineup; he just went into a prolonged funk that took him out of that role for a while. Swanson and Shaw (and, to a lesser extent, Nico Hoerner) are valuable complementary pieces who can take over an occasional game themselves, which is how this team came to seem so thoroughly dangerous back in April and May. The season has aked this team hard questions, and they haven't always found satisfactory answers. For the throng that filled Wrigley Field to begin September (and the throngs yet to come, throughout this month and (the team hopes) the next one), though, real satisfaction will hinge on how they do on the remainder of the test. They rediscovered their formula for wins just in time Monday. Now, they have to multiply the recipe to make a bigger batch.

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